Superare Divos
by Orestes Fasting
Summary: Enjolras and Combeferre are more than friends and less than lovers, until Combeferre discovers there are some things that should not be touched. Slash.


They first turned to each other in the aftermath of July, as triumph and exaltation collapsed into frustration and impotent rage. Perhaps it would never have happened if the delirious heat hadn't worn down their caution, or if the sleepless nights spent working to salvage their victory hadn't forced them to communicate as directly, as honestly, and as instantaneously as possible. After the third night Combeferre only had to look at Enjolras a certain way for Enjolras to know exactly what he meant, and Enjolras only had to touch Combeferre's hand and murmur a few words for Combeferre to understand. Taking the trouble to fully articulate their thoughts would have been a pretense, a useless impediment to their frantic work. When they could do no more or they had exhausted their candles, they would fall asleep side by side, not even bothering to go to their separate beds.

If it had gone on for more than a week it might have killed them, but a week was enough to show them the futility of their efforts. They retired one night conscious of their defeat, drunk with fatigue and despair but strangely lucid after all their mental exertion. By unspoken agreement, they both knew this was the end of the battle, and for the first time they went to bed in each other's arms.

The sheer impotence of their position made Combeferre crave something, some sort of completion, some sort of release. Prudence would ordinarily have restrained him, or fear that Enjolras didn't share his mad desire, but there was no prudence left in their current state, and no barrier left between them. He knew without having to ask that Enjolras felt exactly as he did. So it came as no surprise when Enjolras pulled him closer and the heat of their joined bodies burned even more maddeningly than the heat of the July night.

They melted together, blindly seeking release, sweat-drenched nightshirts pushed up around their chests, until Combeferre could hardly tell whose body was whose. The hand on his thigh could have been Enjolras' or his own, and he didn't care; their erections were trapped between their pressing bodies, rubbed against hips and stomachs that were slick with sweat and heaving with desire. They drove each other to madness like that, in silent intensity, until Combeferre muffled a groan in Enjolras' shoulder as he climaxed. Consciousness returned to him afterwards, of Enjolras still writhing and thrusting in his arms, a separate body but still inexpressibly close as his seed spilled in hot spurts all over Combeferre's chest and stomach.

They fell asleep in a sticky, mutually satisfied embrace, and woke the next morning resigned to the battle they had lost. What had happened that night required no explanation; perhaps it had no explanation.

They never spoke of it and never kissed, although from that night on they slept chastely in each other's arms. The closeness forged between them on those July nights endured. They were more than friends and less than lovers, joined but not tender with each other.

And sometimes, when their work towards the ideal threatened to consume them, they found solace in nights like that first night. A crushed riot, a new repressive law, and they would exchange a haggard look before going to bed together; never a word or a kiss passed between them, only unspoken understanding. Enjolras would bring Combeferre to release with hands that still smelled of gunpowder, or Combeferre would clutch Enjolras' back, leaving black fingerprints from the ink of seditious pamphlets, as Enjolras spent between his thighs. Most often, they would do as they had done the first night, and seek mutual pleasure in the simple press and slide of their bodies.

Sometimes, in incidents few and far between, when it was despair and not frustration that threatened to consume him, Combeferre had Enjolras penetrate him. The first time was in the winter of 1830, when a little boy who never spoke died under his care in the hospital. For days he could think of nothing but starvation and abandonment, the yellow mud they found in the boy's stomach, the dull chilling knowledge that he was but one of many. Combeferre himself barely spoke that day. Enjolras' few, quiet words about progress and a brighter future couldn't chase away the specter of his own helplessness; even Enjolras' embrace barely lifted the leaden weight that hung over him. Finally, sick of feeling oppressed instead of determined, he pulled Enjolras on top of him and sought a greater intimacy than they had ever before dared. He lost himself in the pain and the strange intoxication of Enjolras inside him, gave himself completely, felt himself destroyed and then made anew with a little bit more of Enjolras' strength and conviction.

Their nameless, intermittent liaison lasted almost two years. As the riots and cholera deaths and arrests and tantalizing partial victories multiplied, they spent more and more nights in each other's arms. The first time they spoke of it was the end of May 1832.

The Friends of the ABC had arranged a meeting with the Cougourde in a secluded spot off the Champs-Elysées. It turned out to be a bad meeting place, as trysters and prostitutes of both sexes were there in search of seclusion as well, and they had fended off a half-dozen before they realized the Cougourde members weren't going to show up. Just as they were about to leave, another boy prostitute burst in on them--followed by the police.

The police were unimpressed with their explanations that they had merely wanted a picnic in the countryside near Paris and had no idea they were camped out in a notorious cruising ground. Some of the Friends of the ABC might well have ended up with criminal records free of political offenses but with an arrest for gross indecency, had Courfeyrac and Bahorel not improvised off each other to come up with an impressively obscene, violent rant about the cruisers in particular and pederasts in general. After the fifth detailed, anatomically impossible explanation of what Bahorel would do to any man who accosted him that way, the policeman laughed out loud and let them go.

Enjolras remained impassive after the police had left, but he must have noticed the tension in Combeferre's posture, for he remarked, "That was unduly vitriolic for being directed against men with a harmless vice."

"Well, we were exaggerating for the copper's benefit," said Courfeyrac with a shrug. "Weren't we, Bahorel?"

Bahorel grinned. "A bit. But the essential was true, wasn't it? Filthy business, men acting like women. Saw one of them off in the bushes with his legs spread like a whore. They're less then men, less than women even."

Combeferre's jaw was clenched shut alarmingly; his face was redder than the rouged cheeks of the boy who had brought the police down on them. He said nothing.

"Save your violence for that which can actually harm you," said Enjolras, and the conversation was over.

That night, Combeferre pushed Enjolras roughly away when he tried to embrace him. "Going to make a woman of me again?" he said.

The breaking of their long silence was shocking to them both, and Enjolras looked at him a long time before responding. "That is not how I think of it, and I believed it wasn't how you thought of it either."

"Perhaps you don't, but does that make me any less a catamite when I let you take me? How about the fact that I enjoy it? What do such penchants make me, if not a man playing the role of a woman? How is that not degrading?"

"You have never degraded yourself in my estimation," said Enjolras, "only raised yourself. You give freely, with your body as well as your mind."

"And you do not, because you don't have my unnatural inclinations."

"Because we are different, even though we are equals. Equal does not mean the same."

"And yet--I can't explain it, you won't understand, I don't know if even I understand," said Combeferre brokenly. The sudden realization that he and Enjolras no longer understood each other made him ache inside.

"What do I have to do to convince you that nothing we have done is degrading?" said Enjolras. "What proof do you need?" He seized Combeferre's hands and looked him straight in the eye; Combeferre looked back at him, troubled and unconvinced.

Enjolras held his gaze for a long, long moment, probing with his eyes. Finally he pulled back and began stripping off his clothes.

"What are you doing?" said Combeferre.

"Showing you," said Enjolras. He stretched out naked on the bed, held out a hand to Combeferre, and spread his legs. "Take me," he said.

Combeferre shook his head. "I can't. Won't. Shouldn't."

"Do it," said Enjolras, and this time it was an order.

Combeferre swallowed and clasped Enjolras' outstretched hand. Enjolras smiled at him.

He undressed as quickly as he could and lay down on top of Enjolras, brushing his fingers nervously up Enjolras' thigh. Over the course of his slow, careful preparations, he would sometimes shoot an uncertain glance at Enjolras, who always responded with a calm but encouraging nod. His composure never slipped, even as Combeferre's fingers delved deep inside him, slowly opening him to a new and unnatural union.

When the moment finally came, Combeferre could not bear to look Enjolras in the eye for fear of seeing that perfect composure sullied. He pressed his face into Enjolras' chest instead, feeling and hearing the sharp intake of air at the first thrust. The pleasure was intense: direct, carnal sensation, coupled with a renewal of their old bond, the sense of feeling and acting as one. He didn't have to ask when Enjolras was ready for more; he could feel the clench and then the slow relaxation of his muscles, the evening out of his breathing, as though they were his own. Putting their affair into words had thrown him into uncertainty, but now, when there were no more words, he felt he knew Enjolras again. He knew when it was all right to push further in, feeling rather than hearing the low noises of pleasure deep in Enjolras' throat; he fell into a rhythm that suited them both, slow and deep, burying himself completely with each thrust and then pulling back until only the head of his cock was still inside Enjolras. It seemed to go on forever, a great maddening delirium where time had no meaning.

Near the end, when he felt ready to burst with pleasure, he realized Enjolras was not aroused. And yet his intermittent gasps and cries were unmistakably those of ecstasy. Dimly confused, Combeferre lifted his head from Enjolras' chest and looked up at his face, and what he saw took his breath away.

Enjolras' lips were parted; his eyes were open and fixed on some far-distant point. The rapture on his face, clearly on an entirely different plane from the carnal pleasure that was driving Combeferre out of his mind, was something Combeferre had only seen once before in his life. He came with a wordless exclamation and sank down onto Enjolras' shoulder.

As he lay there, limp and exhausted, the memory slowly came back to him. The barricades of July. Staring over their pile of paving stones, right down the rifle barrels of the National Guards advancing on them. Enjolras seizing a tricolor flag and planting it on top of the barricade, exposing his chest to the bullets. He had worn the same otherworldly expression of a man giving over his entire person to something greater than himself. And the National Guards, struck with a religious awe at the sight of the long-banned tricolor and this young man ready to give his life for it, had lowered their guns and joined the insurgents.

Combeferre, lying there in Enjolras' arms, felt something inside him retreat before that memory. He had been wrong to do this. He had trespassed upon something untouchable: Enjolras' devotion. To arrogate that to himself was blasphemy.

"Never again," he murmured, knowing in his heart of hearts that he would never lay hands on Enjolras as anything more than a brother.

"I understand," said Enjolras softly. "I don't regret it, but I understand."

Combeferre pressed a silent, reverent kiss to Enjolras' forehead, the first they had ever shared. Enjolras clasped his hand, and they fell asleep like that, lying side by side.


End file.
